“Roger Copeland’s ‘The Unrecovered’ peels off the protective lid (from 9/11) to let out dark thoughts and speculations… Articulate and quirkily analytical, ‘The Unrecovered’ suggests a cross between a Spalding Gray monologue and the digital scrapbooks of late period Jean Luc Godard… Copeland knows how to tease the maximum meaning out of images and juxtapose them to achieve magic realism. He turns the instructional video of a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures into a ribbon of grief, and gets tone poems out of a backyard swing, construction cranes (and) skeins of branches against a winter sky….Haunting, gut-punching, brainy, and gutsy… “The Unrecovered” can “spook us to a higher recognition of what true shock and awe look like.”
—James Wolcott, “Through A Lens Darkly” Vanity Fair Feb. 2006
“Wildly ambitious…and wildly exciting.”
—Claudia La Rocco of The New York Times (on WNYC’s “All Things Considered” 9/11/07)
“It’s just an amazing piece of work–so rich with ideas; so visually compelling; and most of all, so completely enjoyable, moment by moment. It may be “experimental” and “non-narrative,” but somehow (and this is the film’s great achievement, in my opinion) it still provides a kind of traditional moviegoing thrill. I love the way the film teases the viewer’s brain on so many levels: Even as it’s forcing the viewer to challenge his previously held ideas about causation and narrative, it seduces the viewer with little morsels of causation and narrative, which just puts the viewer that much more in touch with his own atavistic movie going hungers and habits, and causes an almost pleasurable sort of vertigo. i.e., it’s the perfect blend of form and content: this film about the psychological aftermath of 9/11 HAD to be a film. That HAD to be your medium! In any case, I was incredibly impressed, and am looking forward to watching it some more.”
—Darcy Frey, author of The Last Shot, contributing writer The New York Times Magazine
“I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of your achievement…The only way to assimilate the horrors of 9/11 and our own fears is to face them candidly, and that’s what your film has done, with deep and deft artistry. It’s uncannily virtuosic–both technically and poetically–and astonishing for a first feature. It helps us see, as dreams do, that 9/11 broke down barriers in our unconscious assurance that things like this could and would never happen to us, that our destiny as Americans is to be shielded forever. It left us naked with all the fears that humankind has faced from time immemorial….
On a purely aesthetic level, what you have managed so brilliantly, in “twinning” like and opposing phenomena and meanings, is to make us aware of the fragile wall separating “reality” from “nightmare,” “The Unrecovered” is more like a dream than a film–our films are our dreams, our dreams films. Your film MUST be seen.”
—Allen Kriegsman, critic emeritus, The Washington Post, (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Arts Criticism)
“I’m haunted by ‘The Unrecovered’…This film is what we’ve all been thinking about since 9/11.”
—Adrienne Kennedy, author of Funnyhouse of a Negro and A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White
“I was knocked out. Really gets under your skin… A grand tour of some very difficult stuff.”
—Eric Bogosian, author of Talk Radio, SubUrbia, and Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll
“ ‘The Unrecovered’ is really haunting. I think it managed to get into my dreams.”
—Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World
“Stratospheric….Figuratively, it is as if those Al Qaeda planes had struck film conventions along with the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. This is more than postmodernism….”
—Stanley Kauffmann, film critic, The New Republic
“A mind-bending trip down the rabbit hole of pop culture and intellectual query… Copeland has accomplished the near miraculous”
—Joanna Connors, The Cleveland Plain Dealer 9/12/06
“I was deeply impressed—fascinated by the ways in which you layered reality and fiction and by the cumulative effect of the almost dizzying collages of clips. The mysteries are intriguing, too. Is the conspiracy theorist the girl’s father? By what kind of osmosis, is she transported—not to heaven via “the Rapture”—but into the mind of a young Islamic would-be suicide bomber? The desperately fluttering hands of the Asian flight attendant in relation to the dying Monarch butterflies? You packed so many provocative ideas into the film….”
—Deborah Jowitt, dance critic for The Village Voice
“A superb example of history as the nightmare from which we’re still trying to awaken, the immediacy of that history encroached upon by the apocalyptic.”
—Herbert Blau, author of The Impossible Theater and founding co-artistic director of The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center
“Much the best thing yet about 9/11’s assault on our psyches…”
—Robert Brustein, Theater Critic, The New Republic
“Like Brian De Palma’s forthcoming ‘Redacted’ Roger Copeland’s ‘The Unrecovered’ explores the modes of perception in an age of fear, paranoia, and messianic fervor; it has the persistent throb and hallucinatory jabs of a nightmarish hangover”–“The 9/11 Afterture,”
—Vanity Fair.com 9/16/2007
First Public Screening: September 12, 2007 New Filmmakers at Anthology Film Archives, New York City
Roger Copeland is Professor of Theater and Dance at Oberlin College. His essays about theater, film, and dance have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Village Voice, Film Comment, Partisan Review, American Theatre, and many other publications. His books include What Is Dance? and Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. His film Camera Obscura won the Festival Award at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in 1985. In 1989, Recorder, a video adaptation of his theater piece, The Private Sector, was screened on WNET’s Independent Focus series on Channel Thirteen in New York City.